Of all the New American Poets, just two proceed as though the language of poetry were primarily a process of logic and not of speech: John Ashbery & Jack Spicer. I literally had this thought while taking a shower this morning, the cleanest thinking I’ve done on the subject.

I never join Spicer in my imagination to Ashbery. Their sense of what that logic might be or might mean is so very different. In Spicer’s case, it’s a process of perpetual, even compulsive, contradiction*, lines & ideas constantly undercutting one another until the final result cannot possibly be added up to a single idea, but rather a pulsing, resonating core of contrasting impulses:

Get those words out of your mouth and into your heart. If there isn’t

A God don’t believe in Him. “Credo

Quia absurdum,” creates wars and pointless loves and was even in Tertullian’s time a heresy. I see him like a tortoise creeping through a vast desert of unbelief.

“The shadows of love are not the shadows of God.”

This is the second heresy created by the first Piltdown man in Plato’s cave. Either

The fire casts a shadow or it doesn’t.

Red balloons, orange balloons, purple balloons all cast off together into a raining sky.

The sky where men weep for men. And above the sky a moon or an astronaut smiles on television. Love

For God or man transformed to distance.

This is the third heresy. Dante

Was the first writer of science fiction. Beatrice

Shimmering in infinite space.

Joining war to love is a typical Spicerian strategy. But look at the length of that third line or Spicer’s use, here as well as elsewhere, of starting a sentence with a single word on one line – the enjambment is felt, but for emphasis – with the remainder on the next. Plus Spicer capitalizes Him precisely at the point where the poet suggests that He might not exist.**

I’ve suggested elsewhere that Spicer’s formal training as a linguist is what inoculated him from the mystifications of speech that accompanied the most extreme Projectivist pronouncements. But virtually all of the New Americans bought into speech as a model for directness in their poetry – you can see it in people as diverse as Frank O’Hara, Paul Carroll or Lew Welch. & some, like Paul Blackburn, went to even greater lengths than Charles Olson to demonstrate how transcription might be utilized to represent various aural aspects of the spoken.

It is one thing to note that speech is not the model Ashbery relies on in the disruptive texts of The Tennis Court Oath such as “Europe” or “Leaving the Atocha Station”:

The arctic honey blabbed over the report causing darkness

And pulling us out of there experiencing it

he meanwhile . . .   And the fried bats they sell there

dropping from sticks, so that the menace of your prayer folds . . .

Other people . . .               flash

the garden you are boning

and defunct covering . . .***

That first line is virtually a linguist’s example of “impossible language.”+ But what about this text from that same volume, its famous title also the first line?

How much longer will I be able to inhabit the divine sepulcher

Of life, my great love? Do dolphins plunge bottomward

To find the light? Or is it rock

That is searched? Unrelentingly? Huh. And if some day

Men with orange shovels come to break open the rock

Which encases me, what about the light that comes in then?

What about  the smell of light?

What about the moss?

In pilgrim times he wounded me

Since then I only lie

My bed of light is a furnace choking me

With hell (and sometimes I hear salt water dripping).

I mean it – because I’m one of the few

To have held my breath under the house. I’ll trade

One red sucker for two blue ones. I’m

Named Tom. The

I’ll break here mid-sentence just to note use of the first-word-at-line’s-end tactic deployed here pointedly mocks the possibility of such positionality lending extra emphasis for the sake of meaning.

Because Spicer & Ashbery both use address – the language of the dramatic monolog – as the exoskeletal structure of their poems, we generally do feel spoken to as we read them. But neither ever uses line breaks to approximate any element of breathing, a la Olson, Creeley or even Ginsberg. And while Spicer’s logic is one of constant undercutting, Ashbery’s is more faceted. The next sentence is apt to take one term of the previous one and take it into a different direction, the way light & rock are used in the passage above. It is also apt to stop and go into an entirely different mode of address – Huh – such as the metalanguage that stops mid-thought to suggest an exchange of lollipops.

There are, of course, other New American Poets who show disinterest in fetishizing speech through poetic form – Jimmy Schuyler for one. But Schuyler is principally a poet of sublime description. It is only in Spicer & Ashbery that you find logic raised – though hardly as one might find it in a philosophy or rhetoric program – to function as the actual engine of verse. What amazes me is that, having read each of them for some 35 years, I’ve only just now noticed.

* The “Not this. / What then?” structure of Tjanting comes right out of my reading of Spicer.

** Spicer’s god might be terrible & terrifying, but any other than  a brand new reader of Spicer’s will realize that this poet was deeply a believer.

*** Ellipses in the original.

+ Although, thanks to the parsimony principle, perfectly readable.